Why can’t we win the World Cup?

A blog has to fulfil three requirements: it needs to be topical, brief and suitable for its target audience. In the case of this one it ought, therefore, to have some vague connection with religion. So, what do I have to say about England’s lamentable performance against Germany in the World Cup?

Firstly, I have to admit that I know nothing at all about Association Football. I am nevertheless prepared to state with the required certainty why (when we do) we perform so badly in competitive games: it is because of one key element in the secularisation of modern culture: the inexorable compensating rise of political correctness. ‘Man’, said Chesterton, ‘can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas’: if the dogmas are not true, they will be false.

At some point in the last few decades, the educational establishment came to agree that its overriding priority was to make children feel good about themselves: none of them should ever feel inferior to anyone else in any respect. And that belief gave rise to a political campaign which continues to this day, well summed up in her local paper by the Lib Dem MP Sandra Gidley. “I would ask,” she urges, “that we try to get away from competitive sport in schools and think about increasing exercise and activity.” She specifically attacks team sports like hockey and football and claims that many adults had been put off exercise for life “because they were still haunted by their experiences at school”. Many thousands of schools have been implementing this PC idiocy for decades. The last time we won the world cup, it was unknown.

Incidentally, I am prepared to bet that the winner of the world cup will be a traditionally Catholic country, not known for political correctness. QED, maybe?

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Dr William Oddie is a leading English Catholic writer and broadcaster. He edited The Catholic Herald from 1998 to 2004 and is the author of The Roman Option and Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy.